Monday, February 20, 2012

Jeremy Lin and American Immigration

Jeremy
Lin’s meteoric rise in sports and popular culture has been incredible as the Harvard
alum-turned-New York Knicks point guard was satirized on “Saturday Night Live”
while appearing on the cover of Sports
Illustrated during the same week. Indeed,
“Linsanity” has spawned tremendous discussion about race and ethnicity in
professional sports, much of it poorly informed. As the son of Taiwanese immigrants, Lin’s historical
importance is how he embodies a long American tradition of sports serving as an
avenue of assimilation for recent immigrant groups.

Though
there was a significant Irish and German immigration in the mid-19th
century, the largest wave of newcomers came to the U.S. from eastern and
southern Europe between 1882 and 1924.
Unlike previous immigrants, who had mostly come from northwestern
Europe, these new arrivals hailed from Italy, Russia and the Austro-Hungarian
Empire. The background of these
immigrants, many whom entered the U.S. through Ellis Island, spawned a fierce debate
about the nature of American identity in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries. Many Americans believed
eastern and southern Europeans weakened the country because they were racially
inferior; others were concerned that a large percentage of them were Catholic
and Jewish. Labor unions feared they
would lower wages for American workers. As
a result, some native-stock Americans formed organizations to halt the wave and
after many years of lobbying, Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924,
which sharply curtailed immigration from eastern and southern Europe by
creating small quotas for newcomers from those nations

By the
1930s, first-generation sports heroes became symbols of pride for these
immigrant communities, smoothing their entrance into the American
mainstream. The Jewish-American baseball
player Hank Greenberg became a star first baseman for the Detroit Tigers during
the Great Depression. With the backdrop
of Hitler’s rise in Europe and growing American anti-Semitism, Greenberg won
two American League Most Valuable Player awards and challenged Babe Ruth’s
single-season home run record in 1938. In
the same era, the Italian-American Joe DiMaggio emerged as the successor to
Ruth and Lou Gehrig as the star of the New York Yankees, setting a major league
record by hitting in 56 consecutive games in 1941. Given their outsider status, Jews and
Italians took particular pride in the achievements of Greenberg and
DiMaggio. Furthermore, the baseball
stars’ accomplishments earned them respect among the older American population,
contributing to the weakening of the anti-Semitic and anti-Italian sentiment
that remained virulent in the 1930s United States.

With the military
service of first and second-generation Ellis Island immigrants in World War II,
nativist sentiment began to decline. The
soldiers returned home and participated in the economic boom of the 1950s,
moving out of the old urban neighborhoods and into the suburbs, where ethnic
identity was not as visible. Furthermore,
the civil rights movement undermined the scientific racism that had served as
the basis for the restrictions of 1924.
In 1965, Congress passed and President Johnson signed the Hart-Celler Act,
which removed the quotas that had limited immigration from eastern and southern
Europe. For a number of reasons,
legislators believed that they were simply ending an antiquated system and did
not think the change would precipitate renewed migration to the United States.

They were
wrong. Hart-Celler facilitated a new
wave of immigrants came from Latin America and Asia in the last third of the
20th century, again reshaping the nation’s demography. Today, the percentage of
Americans born outside of the United States is the highest it has been since
1920. As we have seen in recent years, this migration has renewed the early 20th
century debates about “Who is an American?”

Like the
Ellis Island wave, many first-generation immigrants attained prominence in
sports. In particular, Hispanic
Americans have reached tremendous heights in baseball, growing from a little
over ten percent of major league players in the early 1990s to over a quarter by
the early 21th century. The
number of all-star Latino players is simply too long to list, though Sammy Sosa
earned the greatest fame because of his duel with Mark McGwire for Roger Maris’
single-season home run record in 1998 (though the two of them have had some
difficulties since, as you may have heard).

Lin is
certainly not the first Asian-American sports star. The Chinese-American tennis player Michael
Chang, who was overshadowed by contemporaries like Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras
in the 1990s, comes to mind. Still, Lin’s
success is comparable to Greenberg’s in that it also breaks down the stereotype
than an ethnic group known for excellence in academic pursuits can’t do the
same in athletics. Though he has only
played a few weeks in the NBA, “Linsanity” has gone a long way to accomplishing
this end.

Only time
will tell if Lin can sustain his current level of play. The history of sports is littered with phenoms
who have started strong and then disappeared almost as quickly. Whatever the end result, his status as an
ambassador for a recent immigrant group is part of a long American pattern.